The Vale of York clinical commissioning group (CCG) will make people wait for up to a year for treatment for non-life-threatening conditions such as hip and knee replacements if their body mass index is 30 or higher.

adult smokers will have elective surgery postponed “for six months or until they’ve stopped smoking for eight weeks”.

But does the NHS really need to do this? Consider Spain, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Israel, Malta and Cyprus. What these countries have in common is they all spend less per person on health care than the UK, and they all live longer, as this graph from Gapminder shows:

If the UK looked at what these countries are doing, maybe we could learn something.